"We've been busy, " concurs Bill Mathews , a former Navy SEAL and executive vice president at Blackwater , a North Carolina-based firm that offers self-defense, survival and firearms training for the U.S. government and has about 2, 000 personnel stationed throughout the world, including Afghanistan and Iraq.

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It is not the survival of the self that matters, of course not, for we all know that that ends.

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The companies, in survival mode and out of pure self-interest, jump at the chance, as even a weak government case can destroy them.

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The plotting seems dangerously self-interested, being concerned almost exclusively with the survival of the mutants themselves, and, behind the succulent effects, the tone is oddly hectoring, instructing us to behave liberally toward these nice boys and girls whose only quirk is the ability to create thunderstorms or hurl fire.

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At one end of this spectrum are the values people hold when the struggle for survival is uppermost: they say that economic and physical security are more important than self-expression.

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